Huntington National Bank (Nasdaq: HBAN) has hired Amit Dhingra, as Enterprise Payments Director. The move is in recognition of the need to accelerate digital payments for businesses and consumers. Dhingra will manage a new segment of Huntington’s business helping to guide strategy as well as investment. Dhingra will report to Paul Heller, Huntington’s chief technology and operations officer.
According to Huntington, the newly created payments team will leverage existing services as well as launching new products. The payments sector of Fintech has largely been driven by startups and big tech as traditional banks ceded their dominant position. Today, digital payments tend to be low friction and low cost driven by scale, minus a huge staff – almost antithetical to the incumbent banking industry.
Steve Steinour, Huntington’s chairman, president and CEO, said as they invest in their payments product they will drive more value-added services to improve the overall customer experience.
Huntington notes that in the month of May, they acquired Digital Payments Torana, a San Francisco-based, business-to-consumer payments Fintech.
Dhingra previously served as Huntington’s retail payments and consumer lending director. Before Huntington, he was a manager at U.S. Bank and McKinsey & Company.